Memorable Articles
Contents
The Left
Jay Nordlinger, Law and Liberty (2021).
- [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/ "Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene:
Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change."] Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic (2021).
- [ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/charlie-browns-interior-christmas-adventure/617484/ ] Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic (2020).
- "They Had It Coming: The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs.", Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic (2019).
Mark Steyn
Here surely is an almost too perfect snapshot of a culture that simultaneously destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood. The "child" in this vignette ought to be the ten-year-old boy, "hands up against the wall," but, instead, the "man" appropriates the child role for himself: Why, the graduate assistant is so "distraught" that he has to leave and telephone his father. He is pushing thirty, an age when previous generations would have had little boys of their own. But today, confronted by a grade-schooler being sodomized before his eyes, the poor distraught child-man approaching early middle-age seeks out some fatherly advice, like one of Fred MacMurray's "My Three Sons" might have done had he seen the boy next door swiping a can of soda pop from the lunch counter.
The graduate assistant pushing thirty, Mike McQueary, is now pushing forty, and is sufficiently grown-up to realize that the portrait of him that emerges from the indictment is not to his credit and to attempt, privately, to modify it. "No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30-45 seconds," he emailed a friend a few days ago. "Trust me."
"Trust me"? Maybe the ten-year-old boy did. And then watched Mr. McQueary leave the building. Perhaps the child-man should try "imagining" the ten-year-old's thoughts or being in his shoes.
Oh, wait. He wasn't wearing any.
The Right
- Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" Scott Alexander (2013).
Miscellaneous
- Personality disorders, Mayo Clinic description of the three clusters, euphemistically called A, B, and C. Are they psychotics, sociopaths, and neurotics?